Formatdatetime with utcnow not getting the right date when running on a schedule flow

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Posted on by YaelD

Hello,

I have a flow running weekly at a specific time.

At that time, the flow will go and grab and file and copy it to a different location.

That file is named with a date on which the flow runs.

The flow seems to run the next day, so it cannot find the file since the date/name of the file is different.

It ran on the February 17 but looked for a while name that was the 02-18-2021. The file "Huddle 02-17-2021.docx" does exist, but not the one with the wrong date.

I'm getting this error:

It used to work when that task was schedule to run at 3pm that day, but I need to run it later on.

Is there anything I need to add in that expression: formatDateTime (utcNow(),'MM-dd-yyyy')?

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Building flows

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tom_riha 10,185 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hello @YaelD ,

utcNow() gives you the current date in the UTC time zone. If you run a flow at 19:00 in UTC-7 then the utcNow() will give you the next day at 2:00.

You can add the 'Convert time zone' action, use the utcNow() as the input and convert it into UTC-7. Then you can use the output of that action for the file name, it should be the correct date.

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YaelD 15 on at

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Thank you, I'll give that a try.

In the meantime, I found something that could work:
instead of
formatDateTime (utcNow(),'MM-dd-yyyy')
I put this
formatDateTime (addHours(utcNow(), -7),'MM-dd-yyyy')

If it doesn't do the trick, I'll try yours.

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tom_riha 10,185 Most Valuable Professional on at

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That will work also fine, it'll achieve the same result: take the date/time in UTC and move it 7 hours back. 🙂

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Mahipundir 68 on at

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thanks for the answer,

Is there any way I can add 2or3 days, data given by MS form or by manual tigger.? currently I'm using this expression which only adds days to current date.

formatDateTime(addDays(utcNow(),2),'dd-MMMM-yyyy')

Thank you so much in advanced.

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Herbertt 65 on at

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Hi - Should the convert time zone action come before or after the reoccurrence action??

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visalpucca 6 on at

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this medthod is working for me cheer

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